A while ago, when I was considering working for the Institute for Energy Research, I was talking with Jeff Tucker about climate change. He agreed that it would be a “hot topic” for a while, and so that I didn’t need to worry about specializing in the equivalent of Betamax cassettes. Then he said, “Climate change is the Left’s War on Terror.”

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.